Cup winner Jack Eichel calls out his haters

There may not have been a single more motivated player on the Vegas Golden Knights this past season than forward Jack Eichel, who up until this spring had never participated in the playoffs after spending the first portion of his career with the Buffalo Sabres followed by a first year in Vegas in which they barely missed. 

You may remember Eichel giving it to Sabres fans at KeyBank Centre upon his very first return to the arena that he once called home, calling them out by saying that their jeers against him was the loudest that he'd ever heard the building before. He was also more than happy to gesture mockingly to the crowd last season after scoring a hat trick against his former club. 

His name is now forever on the Stanley Cup, and he's going to make sure that his doubters know it. 

"If I were going to sit here and tell you it didn't feel good to shut a lot of people up or prove them wrong, I'd be lying," Eichel said. "It was a great opportunity for our team to do that. A lot of people wrote us off last year coming into the season having not made the playoffs the year before. And even going through the playoffs, it feels like everyone was kind of siding with every team we played against. We heard it as a group and we understood there wasn't a whole lot of respect for our team. And we used it as fire and motivation. Having gone through some of the stuff and all the criticism and people attacking me and my character, I think it a was nice feeling to try and change that narrative." 

Eichel was taken by the Sabres 2nd overall in the 2015 NHL Draft behind Connor McDavid, and while he enjoyed several productive years in western New York, his messy divorce from the franchise is well documented and certainly left a sour tastes in the mouths of fans who once cheered him. 

But he's a Cup winner now, and nobody will ever be able to take that away from his resume.

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